What is the purpose of grammatical gender??

Guest   Wed Apr 23, 2008 4:09 pm GMT
That might be the case for Portuguese, but it isn't for German, where most of the time there's no logical reason for the assignment of gender.
zatsu   Wed Apr 23, 2008 4:12 pm GMT
Oh, I didn't (directly) answer the question!
The purpose of grammatical gender is to further specify the character of an object.
zatsu   Wed Apr 23, 2008 4:17 pm GMT
~Yes, I can't speak for other languages, I was just trying to point out that grammatical genders aren't totally crazy, at least not for all languages.

Maybe grammatical genders in German don't make sense now, but they did once?
Guest   Wed Apr 23, 2008 4:40 pm GMT
It doesn't make sense 'cause it's arbitrary. Why would a tree be feminine? I can find a dozen reasons why it should be male or neuter. "It stands tall and proud like a warrior, therefore it must be male"...etc.
guest1   Wed Apr 23, 2008 5:02 pm GMT
Phil Wed Apr 23, 2008 5:12 am GMT:

>>I have always thought that the practice of arbitrarily assigning inanimate objects a gender, and the associated grammar that comes with it (i.e declension, and gender agreement), is a tedious exercize, with no real purpose.

I was talking to a German friend of mine, who told me, that learning English was strange for him because we lack articles needed to show gender. He found it perplexing. I asked him why an object needs to have a gender in the first place. He couldn't answer.

Why does one need to communicate the arbitrarily chosen gender of a chair, or a television, or a box? What purpose does it serve, towards effective communication? Lots of languages obviously find this to be very important (even though none of them agree on what gender a noun is), since they have complex ways to make sure that the gender of everything is stated. If they go through all that trouble, there must be some necessity behind it....is there?

To me, its all superflous grammar.....a chair is just a chair. <<

Grammatical gender or noun classes makes it much easier to avoid to repeatedly mention the same things by their proper terms, but by refer to them by pronouns. You also has the possibillity to refer to things mentioned somewhat earlier. They are like pinters in a programming language or like registers in a microprocessor. If a processor has 3 registers (comparable to a language like German having three genders), it can refer to 3 different data structures simulatniously. So, if you talk about different things in German and it happens that all of them have different grammatical gender, you avoid the need of giving the noun more than once (which would be boring and blows up the length of the text, because pronouns are typically smaller than nouns) or to paraphrase it by other words, which in many cases also can have (possibly insulting) connotations. Of course, you are still free to make such a circumscription if you like to give further informations of the thing or person you want to refer to. But you can't do that very often, because this is a very longwinded style. So gender or -- more general -- noun classes help to make communication more efficient.

In Bantu language, they usually have class systems with somewhere between 10 or 20 classes.

You also can create new words by assigning a different gender for a different meaning to one and the same noun.

It's not that much trouble learning the gender in addition to the orthography of a word. If you are to learn English, you also need to learn the pronounciation aside of the orthography.

I'll give you good advice: Just accept a language as it is. Everything would be boring if it would be just alike.
Guest   Wed Apr 23, 2008 5:13 pm GMT
guest1

"by refer to them by pronouns",
"create new words by assigning a different gender for a different meaning to one and the same noun"

I'm not so sure. Give us some examples.
Guest   Wed Apr 23, 2008 5:44 pm GMT
<<Grammatical gender or noun classes makes it much easier to avoid to repeatedly mention the same things by their proper terms, but by refer to them by pronouns.>>

Are you kidding? English use the pronouns in the same way.

<<You also can create new words by assigning a different gender for a different meaning to one and the same noun. >>

That's mainly in german (das/der See; das/der Geisel) but rarely in other languages.
zatsu   Wed Apr 23, 2008 5:48 pm GMT
<<It doesn't make sense 'cause it's arbitrary. Why would a tree be feminine? I can find a dozen reasons why it should be male or neuter.>>

It doesn't matter which reasons you find or not because it's like that.
But actually a tree may be a masculine noun in some other language, it's a cultural concept.

<< It stands tall and proud like a warrior >>

Again, in Portuguese culture that association wouldn't do.
Warriors are strong and fast (and supposedly unbreakable), trees are serene. "It stands tall and proud like a vigilant" would be more likely.


<<Grammatical gender or noun classes makes it much easier to avoid to repeatedly mention the same things by their proper terms, but by refer to them by pronouns. You also has the possibillity to refer to things mentioned somewhat earlier. They are like pinters in a programming language or like registers in a microprocessor.>>

I totally agree with this.
Grammatical genders are the main reason why nouns can be often omitted or then referred to with pronouns and verb conjugations alone.
zatsu   Wed Apr 23, 2008 5:58 pm GMT
<<<<Grammatical gender or noun classes makes it much easier to avoid to repeatedly mention the same things by their proper terms, but by refer to them by pronouns.>>

Are you kidding? English use the pronouns in the same way. >>

No, it doesn't.
I'll give you an example in Portuguese (sorry if I keep talking about Portuguese, but it's the one I know best)
This may not be the best example, but for instance, if you say:
"Here's a knife and a fork. Its handle is blue.", which one has the blue handle? You can't possibly know, right?

But in Portuguese the knife is feminine and the fork is a masculine noun, so you would say:
"Aqui estão uma faca e um garfo. O cabo dela é azul". - "dela" is a feminine pronoun, so only the knife could have a blue handle.
Guest   Wed Apr 23, 2008 6:24 pm GMT
<<"Here's a knife and a fork. Its handle is blue.", which one has the blue handle? You can't possibly know, right?>>

Wouldn't it be more effective to dynamically tag each noun with a suffix as you go along?

Example (1,2,3 are dynamically assigned pronouncible "gender" suffixes):

Here's a knife1, fork2, spoon3, soupspoon2, and bufferknife3. Their2 handles are blue, their3 handles are green, and its1 handle is black.

What would this example look like in Portuguese?

Altrernatively, you could have hundreds or even thousands of genders, so it would be rare to have more than one noun from the same gender in a paragraph.
greg   Wed Apr 23, 2008 7:58 pm GMT
'Guest' : « But, in other languages gram. genders are tot'ly different! ALL IN ALL, it makes no sense. »

Non, ce qui n'est pas logique c'est que tu ne comprennes pas qu'il existe autant de logiques que de langues. Mais peut-être ne parles-tu qu'une seule langue ?
zatsu   Wed Apr 23, 2008 7:58 pm GMT
Hmm, think it would sound over complicated...
Tagging each noun with a suffix gender would be more like describing different categories or types instead of taking advantage of their inherited natural genders, wouldn't it?
(and then the genders would really be arbitrary!)

Like saying
"There are 3 (different) types: knife is type 1, fork is 2, spoon is 3, soupspoon is 2 and butter knife is 3. In type 2 the handles are blue, in 3 are green and in 1 are black."
Guest   Wed Apr 23, 2008 8:09 pm GMT
Is there an Indo-European language without genders?
Guest   Wed Apr 23, 2008 8:46 pm GMT
"Aqui estão uma faca e uma colher. O cabo dela é azul"

Oh no. Now you don't know which has the blue handle because they're both feminine, so you'll have to repeat the noun if you want to avoid ambiguity, just like in English. What a tragedy.
Guest   Wed Apr 23, 2008 11:29 pm GMT
I wouldn't have thought gender came about in order to sometimes not have to repeat the noun, that's more like a useful side-effect.

I've read it's to do with a natural human propensity to simply somehow see gender in inanimate objects.